Rock Blog

Ranier

Originally uploaded by mnlamberson.

Mount Ranier, Washington — a 14,000+ ft stratovolcano located in Washington state, USA. Note Mt St Helens in the distance a haunting shadow of this giant volcano.

Just ran across this resource link, Predicting Volcanic Eruptions . The module is media rich, and flash based.

The intended audence is somewhat younger than the university age students that I teach, but I believe the principles and concepts are good ones – and sometimes, its not a bad idea to have things simply explained.

As described:

This presentation uses data from several eruptive episodes of Mount St. Helens in the 1980’s to show the way in which a series of eruptions were accurately predicted by USGS scientists as far as 3 weeks before eruptive activity occurred. Several modules demonstrate the use of earthquakes and deformation of a volcano for predicting eruptions and allow you to predict an actual eruption of Mount St. Helens using data collected by scientists of the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory. Choose the screen size to fit your computer.

athy Hickson was there in 1980 when Mount St. Helen’s blew out its side and its top. Of course, its active again. The Discovery Channel Canada – Daily Planet interviewed Kathy about this… and you can access that interview here.

Nice short article with excellent links: National Geographic Explorer (Student Magazine) – Hot Spots

Beautiful photos!

The site reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor in How to make your own natural disaster is of interest to me for my EOSC 311 course.

I like the National Geographic Site that they review; the resource is pretty good — but the more useful part is how the Christian Science Monitor reviews the site — good model!

The primary elements of the site are four parallel exhibits looking at Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Hurricanes and Tornadoes. Accessible through an animated matrix on the index page, as well as through a screen top navigation bar visible throughout the site, each exhibit supplements the basic facts with Forces’ most conspicuous visitor draw – the ability to create your own natural disasters. But in the interests of education, the individual sections only present these interactive phenomena after you’ve learned the basics behind the real things.